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Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is a roguelite fix-’em-up that combines the frantic buttons-and-levers work of Space Team and the chaotic manual-flipping of Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes with the repetitive, greasy work of car mechanics. You are the sole useful employee of the titular Rocket Shop, a podunk space garage that looks like it would serve roaches in the instant coffee and use spit to polish headlights, and it is your job to fix the spaceships that come into the shop each day.
Every ship has a bunch of broken modules. Some are easy to understand, like Fuel, Oil, Headlights, and Star Maps, and some take a turn into absurdity, like Tomfoolery, VR, and the Rebreather, which sounds like it might be straightforward but is actually full of snails and pancakes.
Each module has its own specific things to fix, and to find out how to do that, you’ll need to turn to the manual – a lovingly-designed grease-stained binder, full of guides to each module described in painstaking detail. There are steps for each task, which range from relatively simple (remove fuel canister, refill fuel, replace canister) to bafflingly complex (the AI module has a two-page logic flowchart that made us want to cry).
Your avatar in this world is Wilbur, an anthropomorphic fox with too many eyes, enlisted into fixing ships after his predecessor unceremoniously dies. Your immediate boss is a sweary, friendly chap (who turns out to be Death in disguise, able to reincarnate you upon failure), but your corporate overlord is a greedy AI who pops up every few days demanding R.E.N.T., an amount of money that scales rapidly with the difficulty and complexity of the ships arriving at your door, and providing you with rock-hard boss puzzles. Failure results in Wilbur’s gruesome death, and getting booted back to the start again. Buying permanent upgrades can help smooth out the experience, but not by much.
Money is always tight. You can buy non-permanent upgrades, like a faster screwdriver or wrench, but that’ll eat into your profits — and your profit margin is razor-thin as it is, because you have to buy replacement parts out of your own pocket, including machines that you need to actually do the jobs you’re asked to do. Some ships require parts that can only be made with the Encoder or the Honk Pancake Maker, so you’ll have to buy those, then buy enough space to actually house them. You’ll get docked money if you don’t have the right parts until then, and the penalties are often steeper than the money you made from doing everything right. Most days in our early runs ended with us deep in the red.
The actual jobs themselves have a delightful rhythm to them, though, especially once you start really learning the ropes. It’s satisfying to have an experienced mechanic’s knowledge of problems and fixes, culminating in a ballet of back-and-forth as you fill fluids, toss broken parts, and slot new ones into lovely-looking chunky interfaces. Don’t get us wrong – floundering in front of a new module, flipping through the manual in a panic, and then getting docked hard-earned wages for getting it wrong isn’t fun, but building up to competence feels like a worthy reward.
Unfortunately, not all jobs are created equal. The Tomfoolery module in particular deserves to rot in hell, forcing you to complete three janky-ass platforming levels in a row without quitting. The Security module is a loud flashing alarm that kicks you out of whatever you were doing, forcing you to reset the alarm each time, but only giving you two-and-a-half minutes of respite before starting up again. Nuclear reactors are always in meltdown, giving you mere seconds to fix it or die (and end your run). Meteor storms give you a mountain of extra repairs to do, unless you’ve already bought one of the permanent upgrades that gives you a shield. The Identification module requires that you look at a fuzzy, Switch-screen-resolution photo to decide if it is blurry or not (IT IS ALWAYS BLURRY). And the AI module… well, we still don’t understand the AI module.
Even the fun jobs start out frustrating. Often, you won’t even know something’s wrong because you’ve never actually seen what it looks like when it’s right. Some bulbs, apparently, are supposed to be full of fluid; others are full of the wrong kind of fluid. You’ll buy a new part for a module, only to discover that it’s the wrong size, even though you had no indication of what size it should be. Roguelites are supposed to reward the player for understanding the system, not punish the player endlessly until they get it!
Perhaps the most egregious thing this game does is consider its timed mode, Frantic Fixing, to be the “default”. The game is all about doing difficult tasks that necessitate slow movements, organising an inventory, and walking back and forth to buy new parts, and slapping on an eight-minute timer for the hell of it seems cruel and unnecessary. Never mind that several of the tasks have in-built timers, like the Polaroid camera that needs 15 seconds to develop a photo! Never mind that the game is hard enough without time pressure! No, this is the true way to play. Get gud or die.
(We switched to the timer-free mode, Focused Fixing, after a few runs that felt like pulling teeth, and it did help — but the jobs are harder in this mode. Again… kinda mean.)
But, fundamentally, this game was just not designed to be on the Switch. Performance-wise, we didn’t come across any issues, but the controls are a real problem. Many of your tasks require navigating to a particular node on a module and interacting with it, but using a controller means having to hop through a bunch of other nodes first, and although touchscreen controls would help smooth out this problem, there aren’t any. Trying to select the thing you want under time pressure often feels like trying to get someone at Greggs to grab you a sausage roll by pointing frantically at the glass and going, “That one! No, that one!!!” as they confusedly pick up a cornflake cake over and over again.
Maybe Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is a blast on PC with a mouse and keyboard, but by the sounds of reviews, it doesn’t save it from some of its flaws. The timed mode is still brutally, sadistically hard; the difficulty of making money persists; the punishments for failure far outweigh the rewards; and the Tomfoolery module sucks on any platform (although the developers have apparently made it slightly easier in a post-release patch). It’s a fairly accurate, satirical representation of working an underpaid, dead-end job doing soul-breaking menial labour for a company that hates you under the boot of late-stage capitalism, but… well, it’s also exactly that.
Conclusion
Though its expressive fix-’em-up modules and its detailed manual made us want to love the game, we left Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop feeling frustrated, having been beaten down repeatedly by punishing, sadistic mechanics and unfriendly controls. It’s not a great sign when you come away from a roguelite not thinking “One more go,” but rather, “Please, no more.”